ROCK SOLID

The White Stripes, the Strokes, and the Hives.

Will pop—Britney, J. Lo, 'N Sync, and the rest—kill rock? Whenever rock music has been threatened in the past (by disco, by New Kids on the Block), it has rebounded (with punk, with grunge). Sometimes it has wobbled, sometimes it has teetered, but it has never completely fallen down. As Neil Young put it, “Hey, hey, my, my, rock and roll will never die.”

But upon closer inspection Young's Theorem breaks down. True, the best-selling act of 2001 was the alternative-metal outfit Linkin Park, and similar groups like Creed, P.O.D., and Puddle of Mudd have also sold in the millions. But these bands aren't exactly playing rock and roll. Though the dictionary might not make the distinction, rock and roll is a subset of rock distinguished by an extra ingredient: an upjut of energy, a defiant attitude, a backbeat. Jerry Lee Lewis was rock and roll. Gene Pitney wasn't. The Pretenders were rock and roll. The Bee Gees weren't. Elvis Costello was rock and roll for a while, and then he wasn't. By this standard, the moody crooning of Creed and friends doesn't qualify; nor does the self-effacing arena rock of the Dave Matthews Band. But there does seem to be a new crop of bands that favor short, spiky songs galvanized by angst and anger. If these bands—the White Stripes and the Strokes are the best known, and among the best—aren't exactly new, they're a return to something older and more distinctive: to the spirit of punk and, before that, of the British Invasion.

The White Stripes, the pride of Detroit, consist of Jack White and Meg White. He's the principal songwriter, she drums; it's an arrangement that brings to mind the Carpenters, but this is a different kind of timbre altogether. On their first two albums, the White Stripes placed Jack's originals alongside covers of compositions by Son House (“Death Letter”), Robert Johnson (“Stop Breakin' Down”), and Bob Dylan (“One More Cup of Coffee”). The song selection suggests a band with its roots in country blues, and, to some degree, that's the case, although the White Stripes play the blues the way bands like the Kinks and the Who played rhythm and blues: loud and fast and out of control, with yowling dragged-cat vocals and the ever-present possibility of total derailment. After the release of their third, and strongest, album, “White Blood Cells,” the pair went about conquering the worldwide press, not just with their music but with a canny media prank in which Jack and Meg, who used to be married to each other, pretended to be brother and sister. Though the White Stripes are an aggressively eclectic band, both musically and lyrically (“The Union Forever,” one of the highlights of “White Blood Cells,” is cobbled together entirely from dialogue drawn from “Citizen Kane”), the strongest case for their importance rests on their simplest songs. “Fell in Love with a Girl,” the first single from “White Blood Cells,” is a mad rush of a love song with nah-nah-nah backup vocals that sound as though they were piped in directly from the nineteen-sixties. In less than two minutes—it's that short—it distills thirty-five years of garage rock and leaves you wanting more.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are the Strokes, a privileged New York fivesome; the lead singer is Julian Casablancas, the scion of the Casablancas modelling empire, and the seed of the band was planted at Manhattan's Dwight School. If the White Stripes are sixties idealists, right down to their Dylan fixation and their adoration for grizzled old bluesmen, the Strokes are seventies cynics, with a sound that begins in the debauched, jaded fin-de-hippie rock of the Velvet Underground. Despite receiving an immense amount of attention in the British music press, the band has managed to retain its air of downtown cool—to suggest, in short, that it can't be bothered with stardom. The result is a certain smug humorlessness, but the Strokes, to their credit, generally make good on their affectation: “Last Nite,” the lead single from their début album, “Is This It,” is a muzzy ode to urban night life filled with such a mixture of longing and bravado that it almost makes you forget that the band has simply retrofit new lyrics onto the central riff of Tom Petty's “American Girl.” As befits media darlings, the Strokes have been involved in a minor controversy: in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks, a song titled “New York City Cops” was pulled from the album as a result of a chorus (“New York City cops / They ain't too smart”) that suddenly lost its insolence.

Both the White Stripes and the Strokes have become big stars in England, and they are starting to break Stateside. But are they capable of having a more widespread effect, or will they meet the admirable but more subdued fate of dozens of bands, from the Afghan Whigs to Pavement and Sleater-Kinney, who managed to become critical favorites without doing much to change the face of popular music? A movement needs geographic proximity. It needs rivalries. It needs Mick Jagger and John Lennon and Ray Davies, and even Phil May, eying one another with suspicious admiration from across the smoky rooms of London night clubs. A Renaissance, in short, needs Florence. And, while there are plenty of bands that are producing the same kind of music as the Stripes and the Strokes—Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, in San Francisco; the Mooney Suzuki, in New York—they seem to be the result of coincidence rather than of the rich mix of coöperation or competition required for real change. When Jack White was asked by a British journalist about the Strokes, he simply shrugged. “At least it's rock and roll,” he said. It is, but I wish it were more.

More is what you get from a band named the Hives, who aren't from Detroit or from downtown but, rather, from Fagersta, a small Swedish industrial city about a hundred miles northwest of Stockholm. After getting together, in the mid-nineties, the Hives quickly became huge in Sweden, which is sort of like being the strongest person in your house. The band members had stupid-smart names (Vigilante Carlstroem and Nicholaus Arson on guitars, Dr. Matt Destruction on bass, Chris Dangerous on drums, and Howlin' Pelle Almqvist on vocals) and stupid-smart song titles (“a.k.a. I-D-I-O-T,” “King of Asskissing,” “Hail Hail Spit 'n' Drool”); and on their first record, “Barely Legal,” they came off as fairly straightforward punks who distinguished themselves with a sneaky sense of humor. (One recent B side was an instrumental called “The Hives Are Law, You Are Crime.”) The title of the band's second album, “Veni Vidi Vicious,” suggests more of the same, but the record, officially released in late 2000 and just now gathering momentum, is something completely different. Short and sharp, with twelve songs in twenty-eight minutes, it's the most exuberant and powerful rock and roll in recent memory.

The first song is titled “The Hives Declare Guerre Nucleaire,” and that pretty much explains it. With blast-force playing and a monstrous hook reminiscent of the early Kinks, the song brashly looks forward to 2004 (“Had an atomic bore”), 2006 (“Did some atomic tricks”), and beyond. After this declaration of war, the Hives show off their arsenal: tight rhythm guitar, sing-along choruses, and Almqvist earning his name with a rush of wails and yelps. The Hives are in arrears to the Ramones and the Stooges, of course (the second song, “Die, All Right!,” quotes liberally from “Raw Power”), as well as to countless garage bands and the Hamburgera Beatles, but they play as if they had created something entirely new. It's a toss-up which is more surprising: the fact that a contemporary album gets through its first six songs without any discernible drop in energy or the fact that Sweden, previously known for giving us ABBA, Ikea, and other four-letter words, is suddenly churning out intoxicating punk rock.

It's been said that the Ramones' songs weren't particularly short—they were long songs played very quickly. You could say the same thing about the Hives. “Main Offender,” the strongest song on “Veni Vidi Vicious,” and the one most likely to change the world overnight, opens with a simple chord that erupts into a much larger version of itself; Nirvana's “Smells Like Teen Spirit” used this same trick, but took twice as long to get there. “Main Offender” goes like a sports car through a racecourse full of twisty chicanes, sudden stops, and stretches where you can open up the throttle. At the close of each chorus, Almqvist asks, “Why me?,” in a voice so raw-throated, so purely desperate and genuinely insolent at the same time, that it makes Jack White and Julian Casablancas sound like mannerists.

The Hives dress identically: in black suits and white shoes, a natty sartorial scheme well represented on the band's three videos (which have been included on the “Veni Vidi Vicious” CD in MPEG format). “Main Offender” is the standout visually as well as aurally. Filmed in high-contrast black-and-white, with a puckish story line in which the Hives track down and vanquish a rival band named the Negatives (who may or may not have been invented by the fictional Hives as a publicity stunt), the video has the manic energy of a Buster Keaton short—or, for that matter, of “A Hard Day's Night.”

In another video, for the propulsive “Hate to Say I Told You So,” the band is filmed against a stark, cream-colored background; the musicians and their instruments are the only things in the frame, and they command it utterly. At one point in the song, the guitars and drums drop out, leaving just bass and vocals; the Hives visually echo the stripped-down arrangement by freezing most of the band—the drummer in mid-hit, one of the guitarists in midair. When the full band rejoins the song, the stick drops to the drum, and the guitarist to the ground. Almqvist shows off the full complement of rock-singer moves, posing and preening his way through what is, by any standard, a star-making performance. The lead-singer theatrics—he is alternately out of control like Iggy and in control like Jagger—are hardly new. They are part of a tradition that began with the British blues bands, where skinny white kids did their best to approximate the frenetic showmanship of R. & B. vets like James Brown. But, for the most part, it's futile to imagine anything that is both entirely new and any good at all. What works, as the Hives prove repeatedly, is loud guitars marshalled in the service of indelible melodies, and a distinctive but not technically polished voice caterwauling.

Along with the songs, the suits, and the videos, the Hives also have a great back story. In the British press, they have claimed that they are the punk equivalent of a boy band, assembled and trained as teen-agers by a mysterious impresario named Randy Fitzsimmons; to date, all their songs have been credited to him. A Swede named Randy Fitzsimmons? Unlikely. Could this be the Hives' take on the current teen-pop climate, their tongue-in-cheek attempt to both cash in on and subvert the vogue for prefabricated stars?

Most albums, even good ones, start to flag toward the end. “Veni Vidi Vicious” never takes a breath, roaring through “The Hives Introduce the Metric System in Time” and “Inspection Wise 1999″ before concluding with the preposterously catchy “Supply and Demand.” The only false moment is a herky-jerky cover of the Impressions' “Find Another Girl,” which suggests that the band may not be able to branch out into post-punk covers of classic soul ballads. But who cares? While one great album may not a career make, it can certainly tinder a revolution: after the Sex Pistols urinated on the platform shoes of mid-seventies pop music, it didn't matter that they never released another record.

It's been many years since I dreamed about a rock band. Last week, I dreamed of the Hives. In my dream, Sweden was separated from New York by a thin strip of water. The band boarded a ship on the Swedish side, and as it came across the strait a crowd thronged the American shore, screaming spontaneously and unself-consciously, lost in a new apian Beatlemania. The Hives are touring the United States starting late next month. Get stung. ♦

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